How I learned to love Greece again

A disastrous Greek island holiday led a broken-hearted Louis de Bernieres to write his Cephalonian bestseller. For the first time, he exclusively reveals how the country 'wounds' him but still holds him in its thrall

Greece's traditional music is a living tradition - one of the things that encouraged Louis de Bernieres to give Greece another chance. Photo: Getty

George Seferis begins one of his most famous poems with the words: 'Wherever I travel, Greece wounds me.' He wrote as a Greek at a time when his country was in great turmoil, and he was wounded by Greece in a way that a foreigner like me cannot be. Writing in 1936, he saw Greece as a place where 'we don't know anything, we don't know we're all sailors out of work', a place which is nowhere, that people just can't wait to leave, but which is 'travelling, always travelling'.

He cannot have known that Greece was travelling towards a world war and foreign occupation, a civil war, and a long period of discrimination against the left, culminating in military dictatorship. One can be sure, however, that he was wounded by all of it. I think, however, that he would have been delighted by Greece's incorporation into the EU, its contemporary determination to pull itself up by the bootstraps, its democratic evolution and its success in staging the Olympic games - even though the whole world was eagerly anticipating the pleasures of schadenfreude when it all went wrong. The fact is that Greece has stopped simply travelling and has begun to arrive.

My own relationship with Greece is one that has changed my life in ways that amount to much more than the fact that I got one novel out of it. It is a relationship that has involved both love and difficulty, exasperation and pleasure. Like most foreigners, I first went there as a tourist. I was 28, and it was with a woman who, unbeknown to me, was thinking of a way to leave me. We spent two weeks in a horrible part of Corfu, infested with horseflies, where the discos thumped all night and the dogs barked along with them. Our neighbours in the apartment were a father and son from Glasgow, both butchers, who had come to Greece because they had worked out that, even taking into account the price of the airfare, it was cheaper to be drunk for two weeks in Greece than in Glasgow. They only went out at night, and spent the days sleeping off their hangovers. They were pasty faced and as pale as vampires.

The stony beach was strewn with cigarette ends and beer cans. I did enjoy the wine and food, however, and that was a beginning.

On the last night my inamorata gave me the bad news. I learned that I was dumped, and, sitting on the edge of the bed as the dogs howled, we talked about what we really wanted from life. It was at that devastating moment of despair that the muse tapped me on the shoulder and reminded me of what I had known since I was 12. I said, 'What I really want is to be a writer.' My first published novel appeared seven years later. The one I wrote when I got back from Corfu will never see the light of day but it was good and necessary practice.

I had sworn never to go back to Greece but realised eventually that there had to be an exorcism. I spent a blissful two weeks on my own in a lovely part of Corfu, sunbathing naked at the end of a long deserted beach. I befriended Nikos, a Greek waiter who was really a farmer, and he eagerly encouraged my enthusiasm for the music that he played every night in his taverna. He wrote down the names 'Hadjidakis, Xarhakos, Theodorakis'. He said not to buy the tourist stuff but to go to a proper record shop. I was to discover that for years Greece had enjoyed the best quality popular music in the world because all the best composers were setting to music the lyrics of the best poets. It was something that cannot be imagined in Britain, where our composers are all up their own backsides trying to impress other composers, and the poets won't or can't write lyrics. Through the music I got to the poetry - Seferis, Sikelianos, Cavafy, Elytis, Ritsos, Gatsos - and their writing has become so much a part of my intellectual and literary framework that I cannot now imagine living without it. I don't think we have anything to equal them.

This was some compensation for the disappointment of discovering that Greece is not the land of philosophers and sages that I imagined when studying classics at school or philosophy at Manchester. People like me went to Greece expecting everyone to be dressed in togas and carrying scrolls. Greece, however, has no significant modern philosophers, and, while it names streets after its ancient luminaries, it does not have any present engagement with them. For a golden age, modern Greeks look back not to Periclean Athens but to Christian Byzantium. The Greek Orthodox church still has an absolute monopoly on historical and metaphysical truth and the people have a sentimental attachment to it. It's mostly myth but the Greeks remain profoundly grateful to the church for saving their traditions from the savage Turk. I find their priest-worship positively horrible, and although the country produces great poets and musicians, it can't nurture original thought.

The positive side of the church is that the rituals and festivals are completely integrated into Greek social life and are a part of the way Greeks have fun, which is something they excel at. People often ask about my relationship with Greece, partly because there was some controversy a few years ago about whether or not I had been fair about the left-wing partisans in World War Two. This was cooked up by the Guardian, who sent a journalist to Greece to inform ex-partisans that I had insulted them, and to report back on their outrage (he also found yet another person claiming to be the original Captain Corelli; I think there are about six of them now). One Greek newspaper picked up this story and reported it under the line 'The Mandolin of the Gestapo'. I was so insulted that I vowed once more never to go to Greece again, a resolution I stuck to with great determination for about a fortnight.

One of the problems of Greece in the 20th century was that its politics were extremely polarised. You were either very left or very right, and there was no centre. Because I had criticised the leftist partisans, the leftists accused me of being a fascist, while those on the right assumed I must be on their side. I felt a terrible weariness at the thought of trying to explain to both sides that, as a fanatical centrist, I disliked them equally, and wished them equal discomfort in hell. In retrospect I think it was a mistake to have missed out of Captain Corelli the period known as 'the White Terror', when leftists were heavily persecuted in the right-wing backlash after the civil war. It wasn't relevant to my story as it unfolded on the island of Cephalonia, but it left an imbalance.

As the island is very leftist, I think I can safely assume there won't ever be any statues of me erected in the public squares, despite the tourist boom. Greek communists have a yobbish habit of painting slogans and acronyms in huge ugly red letters in all prominent places, including beauty spots, and that's how I know they don't really love their country. But Greece is at last developing a strong political centre, and that will be its intellectual as well as its political and social salvation.

As for Cephalonia, I did take my parents there on a holiday, but I found it annoying being recognised, much as that pleased my mother. I have a guitar-playing friend who runs a cafe in Fiskardo, and I will have to go back just to see him, but recently I have been going to another island, about which I shall probably never write, but which has played a far more important part in my life. One of the intriguing things about Greece is that it isn't really a country in the usual sense; it is thousands of places linked and separated by the sea. One has only to imagine what Britain would have been like if it had consisted of a small mainland and hundreds of islands roughly the size of the Isle of Wight, each with its own, but interrelated, dances, traditions, dialects and cuisine, and separate histories of foreign occupation, to get an inkling of what I mean.

Even the names give you an idea of this. For example, anyone whose name has the suffix '-akis' probably originates in Crete, whereas '-oglou' probably came from Asia Minor. After a disastrous and misconceived war in which they were roundly defeated by Kemal Ataturk, the Greeks had to accept into exile almost the entire Orthodox population of Asia Minor, while Kemal's new Turkish republic took in most of Greece's muslims. It seemed a good idea at the time, but it has left behind it a terrible nostalgia for lost homelands. Because identity was decided upon religious grounds it meant that Turkey received many Greek-speaking people with Greek habits, and Greece received many Turkish-speakers with Turkish habits. Ironically, the descendants of both sets of exiles think of the other country as a lost paradise, as a paragon of civilised and sophisticated life.

I see the two countries as Cain and Abel, each taking its turn to be Cain. They have each had a war of independence against the other. There was a massacre of Greeks, for example on Chios, but then the entire Muslim population of southern Greece disappeared in the War of Independence.

It is interesting to list what Greece and Turkey have in common; Turks and Greeks are both extremely nationalist, something I find irritating in both. They have the same cuisine, even though the Turkish is at present (and probably temporarily) more sophisticated. They have the same touchy and exaggerated sense of personal honour that the Greeks call filotimo and which leads them into all sorts of problems, but which also explains why they have a fanatical sense of hospitality to outsiders, while not feeling obliged to be nice to each other.

It is well-known that Greek and Turkish musicians have no trouble in improvising with each other, and they have the habit of stealing each others' pop hits and putting new words to them. The traditional songs are really the same, just as an English version of 'Barbara Allen' is essentially the same as an American one. All this is because, during Ottoman times, Greeks and Turks cohabited for 400 years.

In the past I have been appalled by Greek Turkophobia - it always took the form of 'One of my best friends is a Turk ... but they're barbarians'. One of the ways Greeks can't help defining themselves is as not-Turkish . This was always bizarre in view of the common history and cultural affinity, and it is not constructive to define oneself in terms of a negative. This is all changing slowly thanks to a new generation of more sensible politicians on both sides, but there is still a great unwillingness in Greece to consider for even a moment the idea that any Turkish point of view might have a rational basis.

The explanation is invariably in terms of ingrained barbarism (even though Turkey has never done anything to Greece as atrocious as what the Greeks did to each other in their civil war), and Greece always sees itself as little David heroically facing up to a grunting, incoherent, and probably smelly Goliath. The Turks generally think of the Greeks as like itching powder in one's underwear; not very dangerous but marvellously irritating. They greatly enjoy overflying the Greek islands, so that the Greek airforce has to scramble. By the time the Greeks arrive, the humorous Turks have usually gone. If they haven't, then they have mock dogfights, which must be fun, and excellent training for both sides. One wonders why they don't arrange it all more formally - a sort of aerial capoeira.

What really divides them more than anything else is religion. Islam is very puritanical and the Turks are consequently more dignified but much less high-spirited and pleasure-loving. It has also hobbled them artistically, and they can't enjoy their own wine without feeling guilty. Unfortunately, both Islam and Greek Orthodoxy are patriarchal, authoritarian and absolutist, and have a vested interest in maintaining clear divisions. They do this by deliberately cultivating and celebrating the memory of martyrdoms and historical wrongs.

In Greece the church thinks you can't be a Greek at all if you are not Greek Orthodox, and in Turkey there has been a long history, now coming to an end, of either suppressing or marginalising anything that doesn't look strictly Turkish. You get told that 99 per cent of Turks are Muslim, but that ignores the high proportion of people who are Alevis. They are, well, kind of Muslim. They typically run businesses because they can't get jobs with the civil authorities.

So far I have had no negative response from Greece about my latest novel, Birds Without Wings. One academic told me it made her cry, because of 'the pain of demythologisation'. As far as I know, no one thinks me a traitor for switching my setting from Greece to Turkey, not least because Turkey was at that time full of Greeks. At any rate, the Turks are thrilled and my Turkish publishers tell me they are getting many letters of gratitude.

It must have occurred to most Greeks that when Turkey finally comes into the EU they will once again have the right to take up residence in Turkey. I remember weeping when I saw on television the destruction of the Berlin Wall. I think it will happen to me again when I see footage of Greek families moving back to Izmir, and Turks buying holiday homes in Crete. I will be wounded by joy, I suppose. I will also be very apprehensive because neither side is short of troublemakers, and troublemaking is a satisfying occupation, especially when masqueraded as righteousness.

The Greeks have the word xenitia, meaning exile, and this state gives rise to the most poignant feelings of nostalgia. I may be a Brit, and Greek Stalinists may hate me, but it is something I feel in myself whenever I have been away from Greece too long. Some of my longing is shamelessly cliched - for a meal in the Plaka, for instance, or a stroll down to the ever-deteriorating Monastiraki market. Some is more refined - for an hour in the music shop of Philipos Nakas, or a visit to the Moschophoros in the Acropolis museum. Some is purely sensual - to stand in a valley of thyme and oregano that is so loud with bees that it is hard to hold a proper conversation, or to go out in October and get drenched in a rainstorm that goes on for three days.

I will never feel nostalgia for the world's worst taxi drivers, the cruelty to cats or the Turkophobia, but from time to time I feel the real thing coming on. It's like being on the end of one of those dog leads that reels you in on a spring. It's a physical longing in the stomach. It's what stops me in my tracks as I think, 'Why am I here when I could be there?' This is chiefly how Greece wounds me; I live in a state of xenitia without even being Greek.

· Birds Without Wings, by Louis de Bernières, is published by Secker and Warburg.